Snow Boys

By Simon Doyle

Dean O'Donnell is a wallflower with a secret and a voice that could steal the show. Preferring to blend into the background at his high school, his world tilts on its axis when he is chosen for a major solo in the upcoming Christmas choir performance. His quiet life is further disturbed when he receives a Secret Santa gift, and an unexpected friendship forms.

Ben Hunter is the boy next door, well-liked but lonely. He wrestles with unspoken feelings for Dean and a family crisis that's tearing him apart. When he takes a job at the local cinema to help his family out of a desperate situation, his academic life begins to crumble under the strain. But that's the least of his worries.

As the holiday season unfolds, so do their feelings for each other. But with Dean's anxiety escalating, and Ben's life turning more chaotic, their differences seem more apparent than ever. Can they navigate their personal challenges and embrace the feelings growing between them? Or will this winter be the season of missed chances and what-ifs?

• Language: English
• Publisher: SD Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223637127

Simon Doyle

Simon Doyle (he/him) was born and raised in County Limerick, Ireland. He discovered that he could travel the world on a shoestring by reading books at a very young age. When he won a local poetry competition at the age of nine, it sparked a lifetime love of words. But he swears never to write poetry again. His first novel release is Runaway Train, book 1 of the Runaway Bay series. He lives with three cats, two dogs, and Lucas, his human soulmate. They met in kindergarten. Where all good stories begin.

Book preview

Snow Boys

Simon Doyle

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SD Press

SD Press

A division of Nightsgale Books

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Copyright © Simon Doyle, 2023

The right of Simon Doyle to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

First published in 2023 by SD Press, a division of Nightsgale Books, Suite 97320, PO Box 26965, Glasgow, G1 9BW

Paperback ISBN 978 1 9163838 6 9

Hardcover ISBN 978 1 9163838 5 2

This publication may not be used, reproduced, stored or transmitted in any way, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the author. Nor may it be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it has been published and without a similar condition imposed on subsequent users or purchasers

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any similarity to real persons, alive or dead, is coincidental

Cover layout by SD Press

Cover art by Wu Lei / B.B.E.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Trinity College Dublin

Contents

Dedication

1.DEAN

2.BEN

3.DEAN

4.BEN

5.DEAN

6.BEN

7.DEAN

8.BEN

9.DEAN

10.BEN

11.DEAN

12.BEN

13.DEAN

14.BEN

15.DEAN

16.BEN

17.DEAN

18.BEN

19.DEAN

20.BEN

21.DEAN

22.BEN

23.DEAN

24.BEN

25.DEAN

26.BEN

27.DEAN

28.BEN

29.DEAN

30.BEN

31.DEAN

32.BEN

33.DEAN

34.BEN

35.DEAN

36.BEN

37.DEAN

38.BEN

39.DEAN

Also By Simon Doyle

About the Author

For all the geeks who dared to dream.

And for all my American readers who put up with my British-English spellings.

Chapter 1

DEAN

Ireland has only two seasons. Winter and not-winter.

The difference between the two is about six degrees Celsius. Which isn’t a lot. But it makes all the difference when I’m trying to decide which coat to wear to school today. Mum used to say, It only rained twice this week. First for three days, then for four days.

It was true. Since mid-September, the rain hadn’t stopped. I was sick of arriving at school looking like a wrung-out sponge. My hair, which you could politely call dirty-blond, would turn to ocean-brown when it got wet, and it clung to my forehead in clumps and dripped rainwater onto my black-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down my nose.

This morning, the rain was at a level eight on a scale of T-shirt to Noah’s Ark. The trees on the street outside were bending under the weight of the storm, and the bus stop was at the end of the block. I put on my heavy parka that zipped up from mid-thigh to throat and pulled the fur-lined hood over my head.

Breakfast, Mum said when I came downstairs. She was standing at the hallway mirror, tying her hair into a knot at the back of her head. She was lucky. She just had to get as far as the car in the driveway.

I’ll be late.

Then take an apple, Dean. You need to stop eating your lunch on the bus.

I eat it on the bus because it’s too tasty to wait until lunchtime, I smiled.

Remind me to give you oatmeal and water tomorrow.

Yum.

I opened the front door and held it against the invasive push of the wind. November was that time between crisp leaves and the thick, burnt skies of winter.

By the time I got to the bus stop, you could have mistaken me for a skinned squirrel. My parka glistened like violet flesh and the faux fur around the hood had wilted into knots.

Huddled with Ashley under a very pink umbrella, Tony pointed and laughed. I met them the day we moved to Paskill, Cork last year. They’d been sitting on the wall at the end of the street watching as we hauled boxes in from the back of a moving van.

Welcome to Roadkill, Ashley said when, in a moment of unusual bravery, I waved at them. I wasn’t brave around people very often. It hadn’t been raining that day. It was not-winter. T-shirt weather.

Population: four jocks, one emo, two geeks and—where do you fall on the social spectrum? Tony said.

I don’t fit on the social spectrum.

Ashley and Tony looked at each other and then, as one, said, Join the club.

So Paskill Roadkill, Cork now had a population of four jocks, one emo, two geeks and three misfits.

Mum invited them in for pizza that day, knowing I never would. I told you I wasn’t very brave, right? And although I still felt out of place and out of sorts, at least I now had two friends to be out of sorts with.

The wind caught Ashley’s umbrella and one of the spokes rapped Tony on the head. Karma, I said, pulling my hood tighter around my face against the icy rain. We stepped back from the edge of the path as a passing car sprayed puddle water into the air.

The bus was warm and damp when it arrived, and Tony and Ashley played Tic Tac Toe in the window fog. They weren’t a couple. Tony said he was aroflux and Ashley refused to identify herself with any preference. We should put all labels in a box and burn it, she said a few weeks after we met.

But without labels, I said, how am I going to know who’s gay? Here’s the thing. I’d come out to them during study group only because Tony was quite vocal about being aromantic. Sexuality didn’t seem to matter to them.

Ashley snorted. They’re called dating apps.

They made coming out seem like no big deal, even though it was. I knew I was gay since I was eleven, but I could never say it out loud. Saying it made it real, and the reality was that being gay in a small town in the extreme southern butt of Ireland was a terrifying and lonely prospect. Being fifteen had its own woes; there was no need to add to that with a special brand of queerness. And I wasn’t sure how my parents would take the news.

But Tony’s outspoken manner and Ashley’s righteous condemnation for all forms of categorisation from sexuality to breakfast cereals (There’s no such thing as kids’ cereal. Calling it that won’t stop adults from eating that chocolatey goodness.) gave me the strength to label myself before anyone else could, if only to my closest friends. I pulled them into the closet with me and they helped me keep my secret. It was better that way.

As the bus pulled into the school grounds and a sheet of lightning brightened the dark November morning, Ashley asked to copy Tony’s homework for one of the few classes they shared, and then she kissed us both on the cheek before saying, See you at study group later? Her class rotation differed from ours and her lunch break was thirty minutes after mine and Tony’s so we only shared fifteen minutes together. Which was hardly enough time to catch up on all of Tony’s gossip. Tony had a lot of gossip.

We slouched off to class, glad to be out of the storm but suffering the ill effects of a sweaty bus ride. Tony’s shoes squelched as he walked down the corridor and one of the younger kids laughed until he scowled at him. Tony didn’t care about anything. That’s one of the things that drew me to them. Tony was so upbeat he could turn the end of the world into a good day. Ashley wouldn’t call it the end of the world, of course—that would be labelling it—but she, too, would put a positive spin on it. No more trig. Maths was her Achilles’ heel. Maths can go screw itself with a sharpened pencil, she said, more than once.

I didn’t know what she found so difficult about maths. It was structured. It was ordered. You knew where you were with maths. Unlike English or philosophy where there was no right answer, maths had your back. It said: this is the correct answer, and it cannot be changed. You do not mess with Pythagoras.

Maths was linear, just like I considered my brain to be. One comes before two comes before three, and it was never out of sequence. The world could crumble to ash but as long as one plus one equalled two, I would survive.

Catch a load of this prodigy, sitting at the front of maths class trying to explain constancy to the teacher who either didn’t understand how my mind worked or didn’t understand maths. When I was ten, my maths teacher marked an answer wrong on a paper despite it being correct.

You worked it out wrong.

I still got it right. My working-out is correct.

But it’s not the way it should be done.

I took a piece of chalk and recreated the sum on the board, explaining my reasoning, and how I arrived at the answer, but the teacher was unmoved.

That’s not the way I taught you.

But my way is faster. And more accurate.

You got nineteen out of twenty, Dean. You still got an A.

But my answer is correct.

Do you want me to give you twenty out of twenty?

No, sir, I had said, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose with a chalk-coated knuckle. I want you to accept that my reasoning is correct.

I didn’t teach it that way.

But that wasn’t the point. I let it go. After that, I tried to conform my mathematical reasoning to the school curriculum, even though I knew they had an immature understanding of mathematics.

Numbers might be constant, but teachers weren’t.

Another constant was school society. Tony and Ashley hadn’t been kidding when they said Paskill had a population of jocks, emos and geeks. It didn’t matter what class I was in. I could see the clear division of the pecking order from day one. Sports jocks ruled the stratosphere. You could tell them from the thickness of their thighs and their brains. They said stuff that made me feel smarter just by being around them.

There was one exception. Ben Hunter.

Ben was the tallest boy in class. He was already sixteen. He played on the school rugby and basketball teams, and he played football on the grass behind the cafeteria at lunchtime even though Clannloch Community School didn’t have a football team. Schools in Ireland were either rugby schools or footie schools. They couldn’t be both. I was sure that was a rule written down by Douglas Hyde, the first president of Ireland. It made total sense.

But Ben Hunter could string a sentence together, and his knuckles didn’t graze the dirty tiled floors of the school corridors when he walked. Not that I had ever had much of a conversation with him. Misfits don’t mix well with jocks. You’d sooner put a cat in doggie daycare and expect better results.

Ben was the envy of every kid in school. His girlfriend, Erin, was his most ardent supporter. She sat on the sidelines of every game with homemade placards and foam fingers. And rumour had it that she was taking the pill. As if that was anything to boast about. Ireland didn’t really have cheerleaders the way American high school movies did, but Erin McNally was Ben Hunter’s one-person cheer team.

Gimme a B.

Gimme a break.

Ben sat at the back of the class with the other jocks, except in History where he sat up front. The history teacher was also the basketball coach. History was my second favourite class, so I put myself in the front row between Alex Janey and Ben Hunter. Not because Ben made me feel faint, even though he did, but if I wasn’t in the front row, the teacher wouldn’t look at me. When talk of three-pointers got out of hand, I tried my best to bring the conversation back to the Irish civil war or the potato famine.

Alex Janey said, Did your spuds bounce back inside your body when they dropped?

And Ben snickered.

And the teacher said, Talking about bouncing balls, Janey, you need to watch your dribbling. You can’t get caught out against West Meath next week.

Alex Janey’s face went red. And I looked back at my textbook instead of anywhere else.

At the end of the day, when the downpour had been reduced to a level five—not quite wetsuit weather but waders are advised—I slinked out of class with the final bell and waited by the exit for my friends. Study group wasn’t a real thing. It meant we could go to Grainger’s Coffee Stop on Main Street and enjoy some time together before we had to go home. At the start of our transition year, when Ashley took different classes, it was her way of keeping the gang together. Transition year in Ireland is where you start to study fewer academic classes and transition into life. Like what we’d already been studying was useless?

Our order was always the same. Caramel macchiato for her, chai frappe for Tony, and a flat white for me to match my extraordinary personality. I’d occasionally add a sugar packet just to spice things up.

Today, listening to Tony talk about food technology class as if making flan was the greatest thing ever, my thoughts turned to Christmas. It was just over a month away and Mum was already talking about booking a restaurant for Christmas dinner instead of cooking it herself. She said that every year, but we never did. I figured it was just something she said that got her through the trauma of the run-up to Christmas.

Secret Santa’s coming up soon, Ashley said.

Are we actually doing that? I thought Mr Dobbins was just joking.

Dobbins doesn’t joke about Secret Santa, Tony said. I heard if you don’t participate, you flunk English.

There’s a five-Euro limit, Ashley said. It’s not like it’s going to break you.

What do you buy for some random jock that you know nothing about? I asked.

Who cares? Buy them a chew toy. Nobody’s going to know who it came from. That’s why it’s called Secret Santa.

But the point of Secret Santa is for everyone to guess who bought what. And I don’t want to be associated with that kind of aggression.

You’re just scared of getting involved with your classmates, Ashley said. She curled her finger in her empty glass to pick up some of the macchiato residue. I don’t know what you’re so scared of. Maybe you’ll buy a gift for some boy, and he’ll fall in love with you. Maybe Secret Santa is your origin story.

My origin story?

Every hero has one, Tony said. Spider-Man got bitten by a spider. Batman had a healthy bank balance and dead parents.

Spoiler alert, Ashley said. But he’s right. Maybe Secret Santa is yours. This town isn’t that small. Someone out there must want a nerdy maths kid with glasses that are too big for his face and a smile that could melt butter.

I pushed my glasses back up my nose and said, Piss off.

But I laughed. Despite myself.

It wasn’t likely.

When our drinks were empty, I refused the offer of a lift from Ashley’s older sister who worked at the coffee shop and said I’d walk home alone. Sometimes I just needed the space. The rain had been reduced to a light drizzle.

The sun went down around four-thirty this late in the year and the streetlights glowed bright white in the rippling puddles. I slouched through the streets with my hood up and stopped for a while to watch the workmen put up the town’s Christmas lights. They weren’t lit; strings of dead bulbs blotting the black night. Men with hard hats erecting pre-Christmas joy.

The beep-beep of a vehicle reversing.

The flashing colours of Happy Christmas signs in shop windows.

Christmas, for most people, meant togetherness. For me, it meant being alone. Sure, I’d spend it with my parents. But I’d watch them kiss under the mistletoe and lie on the couch as they watched romantic Christmas movies where the boy always gets the girl, and I’d understand how empty my life was.

I’d be alone this Christmas, just like every Christmas before.

I had no need for mistletoe.

And mistletoe knew it.

Chapter 2

BEN

When I closed my bedroom door to blot out the sound of my warring parents, I punched the wall and threw myself on the bed. The sting in my knuckles wasn’t strong enough to take away the darkness in my chest that burned hot and bright.

It never was.

I stared up at the hairline fracture on the ceiling that travelled across the yellowing plaster. The glow-in-the-dark stars I’d put there as a child no longer glowed in the dark. At night, with the light out and the curtains drawn, the ceiling was a void where once there was a galaxy of opportunity.

Downstairs, Mum raised her voice and Dad was crying again, his words muffled by closed doors and angry tears. There’d be an empty brandy bottle on the kitchen table. Brandy always made him bawl.

In the morning, the bottle would be stowed under the sink, or in a cardboard box in the garage, waiting to go out on the garden wall with the recycling beside a dozen other bottles, looking like it belonged there.

And if one should accidentally fall…

I rolled over and grabbed my earbuds. I put on some death metal. It wasn’t something I normally listened to, but when Mum and Dad were going at it, it was the only thing that drowned them out. Screaming overcomes screaming.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a normal evening at home. Dad was coming back from work later every day. Mum spent longer at the salon where she worked front-of-house, claiming she had to sweep up a bazillion strands of hair because the cleaner quit and nobody else would do it.

And three times a week, there’d be forty Euros on the kitchen counter, trapped under the rusted coffee canister, and a note that said some variation of working late. Won’t be home before nine. Order pizza. Kill your father and don’t tell me where you buried his body.

Dad bumped into things even when he wasn’t drunk. It’s like he just wasn’t looking where he was going half the time. Who put that there? he’d say, tripping over the shoes he’d discarded twenty minutes before, angry at an inanimate object. Or he’d curse with vehemence when his toe found the sharp corner of the coffee table. It seemed like my very name became a swear word along with the others. For God’s sake, Ben, and, Dammit all to hell, Ben.

Where’s my keys? Dad would say, with his keys in his hand.

Dad’s going insane, I told Mum a few months ago.

He’s always been like that, she said, stubbing her cigarette out on the glass ashtray she stole from work and lighting a new one. He tripped coming up the aisle and your granddad and the priest had to help him into a chair for a few minutes before the wedding could go ahead.

She laughed, but it was her tired laugh. Like she was sick of explaining away her husband’s awkwardness.

Your Nana, God rest her, she took one look at him and said, ‘Are you sure you want to marry such a klutz?’

Downstairs, something smashed. I heard it over the screeching in my ears from the music that I didn’t want to listen to but had no other choice.

When my phone lit up, I was half relieved to have someone to talk to and half annoyed at the interruption.

errrinx

I have to use petrecor in a sentence and I don’t remember what it means.

That was Erin. Not only did she not know the meaning of the word, she couldn’t spell it either.

I paused the music, listening to the air outside the bedroom door. There was silence. For a change.

benhuntss07

It’s petrichor. It’s the earthy smell after rain.

errrinx

You’re a genius. You know everything.

I didn’t know everything, but Erin never listened when I told her that. I didn’t know how planes stayed in the air without falling out of the sky.

Or how people worked.

Erin McNally had been my best friend since we were thrown together in primary school. She stood behind me in the queue to use the teacher’s desk-mounted pencil sharpener and said, I like your hair.

I’d dressed as the Hulk the day before for a kid’s birthday party—I can’t remember who anymore—and there was still some green washout dye in patches behind my ears.

We never dated. That’d be like dating your sister. But no one believed me when I said we were just friends. In the early days, before puberty added a couple of feet to my height and a couple of airbags under her shirt, our parents let us have sleepovers as though it was the most natural thing. And it was. We played dress-up and Cops & Robbers. We slept top-to-toe in the same bed, and all the grownups said how cute it was.

But it wasn’t like that. I liked boys. I always have.

I came out to my parents once, when I was fourteen. I think I’m into boys.

Dad narrowed his eyes and Mum said, No you’re not.

I’m serious.

They didn’t buy it.

Don’t let Erin hear you joking like that.

The living room had been fogged by a cloud of cigarette smoke and the nail polish on Mum’s toenails was chipped as she stretched her legs out on the couch. Dad was on his knees in front of the coffee table, trying to pour sambuca shots without spilling it everywhere. Which he did anyway. Days like those were a million years ago now.

They were okay, when they weren’t arguing. Years ago, I might come downstairs for a late-night snack, and they’d be lying on the couch together watching an old Adam Sandler movie and whispering with quiet smiles lighting up their faces and hands caressing each other.

These days, if they weren’t arguing, they weren’t in the same room.

The silence below stretched out. One of them, probably Dad, will have gone for a walk to cool down. I’d hear him come home again sometime during the night. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and got undressed.

It was raining outside but my room was cloyingly warm for mid-November. I slipped out of my boxers and thought about one of the boys from school.

But Erin texted again; the one friend who could bypass my Do Not Disturb. I really should change that. I glanced at the partial message on the lockscreen. Gemma Ademola is having a party next weekend and she wants to…

I flipped the phone over, leaving her unread, and tried to sleep in the lingering, oppressive heat of my parents’ anger under the simpering darkness of my bedroom.

The silence in my room was swollen and bruised. Even the relentless rain had stopped battering the windowpane. Mum’s weeping came to me like a snake from the gap under the door, sharp tongue touching my cooling skin. I pulled the quilt over my legs.

Dad came home after two in the morning.

There was no more crying.

When my alarm woke me, my eyes were glued together. Sleep wasn’t coming easy anymore. Not for months. I showered and skipped breakfast when Dad said he had to get to the office early. The car ride was punctuated by the rattle of the exhaust that needed to be repaired and when Dad pulled up at the school gates, I said, See you, and Dad nodded. We were at that awkward stage now.

I got out of the car. And when I did, I turned my back on him and dragged a smile over my face.

Smiling was easy. It said, I’m good. Go on, ask me how I am. I’ll tell you I’m perfect, thanks, and how are you?

I pulled the hood over my head. I saw Dean O’Donnell going through the front doors with his friends, but I didn’t wave. We didn’t have anything in common except our class schedule.

And then Erin waved.

I cracked my smile wider to show how ordinarily fine I was.

I’d come out to Erin two years ago, too. The day after I’d told my parents.

You’re not gay, she said.

How do you know?

Because you love Ariana Grande, and you play rugby.

As if the two were mutually exclusive. Gay guys don’t like music or sport?

Maybe you’re bi.

I’m not bi.

Gemma Ademola’s brother was in a knife fight last night, Erin said.

I didn’t know if that connected to my coming out or if she was just changing the subject. Is Gemma Ademola’s brother gay?

He was nearly killed, she said.

I understood why my parents didn’t want to believe me. They wanted grandchildren. They weren’t homophobic, as far as I could tell, although we’d never openly spoken about the subject. Why Erin didn’t believe me, I wasn’t sure.

I sat at the back of maths class between Erin and Alex Janey and stared at the back of Dean O’Donnell’s head. Dean moved to Clannloch Community School last spring, a short, reedy boy with thin lips and a straight nose. The opposite of me. I was tall and my nose had been broken twice from playing rugby. We spoke once, sometime during Dean’s first week in school.

I was standing behind him in the lunch queue and accidentally nudged him with my tray. The sharp scowl that Dean threw me over his shoulder made me laugh.

And blush a little.

What? Dean said.

What?

What’re you laughing at?

I shrugged and stopped laughing. His cute face tied my tongue. Where are you from?

Blarney.

Where the stone is?

Dean’s lips flattened further. It’s famous for more than just the Blarney Stone.

Is it?

It’s even got a McDonald’s.

You’re in the big smoke now, Dean. I liked saying his name. Dean. It sounded like a dimple. I’m Ben, by the way.

Dean said, Just watch where you’re putting your tray, Ben.

And I wasn’t even mad. I couldn’t be. I wanted to pick Dean up and squeeze him tight.

Since then, that was the longest we’d ever spoken. These days, we barely acknowledged each other in the school halls. I was almost certain that Tony and Ashley, Dean’s friends, had warned him against talking to the sports kids.

When the bell went at the end of class, I realised I’d been staring at the back of Dean’s head the whole time. I liked the little tails of hair that curled there, like fingers that touched Dean’s pale skin the way I longed to.

But if nobody believed I was gay, I’d never get to touch a man.

In the hall between classes, I chatted to Alex Janey and a few other boys from the basketball team, but I wasn’t paying attention to their words. I yawned, wondering if I could duck into the space under the assembly stage and grab some sleep, and when I went to the men’s room to splash water on my face, Dean was standing at one of the urinals.

I wanted to turn around and leave, but my brain froze. I went to the row of sinks and ran the cold water. Dean didn’t look over.

When he stood beside me to wash his hands, I gave him a small nod and he twisted his lips into what was probably a perfunctory smile, joyless and brief, macabre in the warped mirror. I held my hands under the freezing water as Dean warmed his fingers under the spitting air of the weak hand dryer. And when he was gone, I splashed water on my face and kept my eyes closed, pressing my knuckles into my eyes. The cold water woke me up, but my brain was still too noisy. One of these days, I’d get a full night’s sleep and feel almost human in the morning.

And starting the week in maths class didn’t help. Alex Janey said maths was invented by the devil to torment mankind.

By the time I got home, Mum and Dad were still out. The note in the kitchen said, Get pizza. I’ll be back before nine.

I texted Erin who was there within twenty minutes. She came with vodka and her homework.

We took the pizza up to my room and drank the vodka straight from the bottle. The sting of it was as weak as my knuckles had been on the wall, but at least it dulled my brain. I had no intention of ending up like my parents, but a few sips might help me sleep.

I pulled out my textbooks and Erin leaned across them for another slice. A string of coagulating cheese died between the pages of Irish civil history.

I closed the book. What’s the point?

The point of what?

Anything, I said. School, I added.

She nudged my thigh with her foot. Because you’re clever, Ben. And one day you’ll get the hell out of Cork.

And go where?

Anywhere you want.